Tag: fact checkers

Biden Complains About Provision That Bans Pentagon From Contracting With Censorship Groups, “Fact-Checkers”

There are few things as jarring as a sitting US administration evoking the First Amendment (constitutional free speech protections) – while the purpose to all intents and purposes seems to be to actually undermine them.

In such cases, the hypocrisy doesn’t simply whisper. Here, it screams. And there have been many such instances over the years.

This is a new example: the Biden administration late last week approved the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for the upcoming year.

One – for an “authoritative democracy,” provisions was that the US Defense Department would not be allowed to contractually work with certain groups, such as by now-infamous NewsGuard, and the free-speech-trampling Global Disinformation Index (GDI) – effectively out there working hard to silence opposition-leaning press in the US.

But then, as soon as the 2024 NDAA was signed by Biden late last week, the somewhat erratic president – or whoever is… advising him – pushed a different story to the public.

“While I am pleased to support the critical objectives of the NDAA, I note that certain provisions of the Act raise concerns,” reads a subsequent statement, signed by Biden.

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NewsGuard Is Selling Its Government-Funded Censorship Tool To Private Companies

The for-profit censorship giant NewsGuard is now selling its “Misinformation Fingerprints” technology to private companies to silence Americans’ speech — technology the federal government helped NewsGuard develop to the tune of nearly $750,000 in taxpayer funding. So while NewsGuard is now making headlines for trying to take down Elon Musk’s X, the bigger story concerns the federal government’s funding of the censorship-industrial complex.

NewsGuard launched a Thanksgiving-week attack on the social media company former known as Twitter, claiming some 200 ads from prominent advertisers appeared on feeds of users spreading lies about the Israel-Hamas war. Elon Musk returned fire, calling NewsGuard “a propaganda shop” that “uses these reports to pressure companies to buy their ‘fact-checking’ services.”

“It’s a profit over any principle model,” the X owner countered.

The verbal sparring between Musk and NewsGuard is likely to continue for some time, but the war on free speech being waged by NewsGuard extends much beyond X and is being subsidized by our tax dollars.

“In September 2021, NewsGuard was awarded a grant through the Small Business Innovation and Research program, which funds early-stage companies to develop products and technologies that can be helpful for government,” NewsGuard announced in its 2021 Social Impact Report. “Under the grant,” the report explained, “NewsGuard plans to further develop the Misinformation Fingerprints tool and test the effectiveness of the Fingerprints in detecting state-sponsored disinformation campaigns.”

Federal records show the Department of Defense funded the Small Business Innovation and Research program’s award of nearly $750,000 to NewsGuard for the further development and testing of the Misinformation Fingerprints tool. And according to NewsGuard’s 2021 Social Impact Report, its “Misinformation Fingerprints” catalog traced “762 false narratives,” “providing one-of-a-kind tracking seeds for the AI tools used by defense industry clients.”

By the following year, NewsGuard reported in its 2022 Social Impact Report that its “Misinformation Fingerprints” technology had accumulated 1,122 supposedly false narratives and been “deployed at scale” — including by social media companies. Since then, NewsGuard has highlighted the use of the Misinformation Fingerprints tool by social media companies “seeking to mitigate falsehoods on their platforms…”

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Microsoft and Meta Detail Plans To Combat “Election Disinformation” Which Includes Meme Stamp-Style Watermarks and Reliance on “Fact Checkers”

And so it begins. In fact, it hardly ever stops – another election cycle in well on its way in the US. But what has emerged these last few years, and what continues to crop up the closer the election day gets, is the role of the most influential social platforms/tech companies.

Pressure on them is sometimes public, but mostly not, as the Twitter Files have taught us; and it is with this in mind that various announcements about combating “election disinformation” coming from Big Tech should be viewed.

Although, one can never discount the possibility that some – say, Microsoft – are doing it quite voluntarily. That company has now come out with what it calls “new steps to protect elections,” and is framing this concern for election integrity more broadly than just the goings-on in the US.

From the EU to India and many, many places in between, elections will be held over the next year or so, says Microsoft, however, these democratic processes are at peril.

“While voters exercise this right, another force is also at work to influence and possibly interfere with the outcomes of these consequential contests,” said a blog post co-authored by Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith.

By “another force,” could Smith possibly mean, Big Tech? No. It’s “multiple authoritarian nation states” he’s talking about, and Microsoft’s “Election Protection Commitments” seek to counter that threat in a 5-step plan to be deployed in the US, and elsewhere where “critical” elections are to be held.

Critical more than others why, and what is Microsoft seeking to protect – it’s all very unclear.

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US Government & NewsGuard Sued by Consortium News

The United States government and internet “watchdog” NewsGuard Technologies, Inc. were sued today in federal court in Manhattan for First Amendment violations and defamation by news organization Consortium for Independent Journalism, a nonprofit that publishes Consortium News.

Consortium News‘s court filing charges the Pentagon’s Cyber Command, an element of the Intelligence Community, with contracting with NewsGuard to identify, report and abridge the speech of American media organizations that dissent from U.S. official positions on foreign policy. 

In the course of its contract with the Pentagon, NewsGuard is “acting jointly or in concert with the United States to coerce news organizations to alter viewpoints” as to Ukraine, Russia, and Syria, imposing a form of “censorship and repression of views” that differ or dissent from policies of the United States and its allies, the complaint says.  

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Hilarious: NBC News Instantly Exposed As Liars After Claiming They “Gained Access” To X Community Notes System

When NBC News published a hit piece claiming that Twitter/X’s Community Notes fact checking system rarely corrects posts and asserting that they “gained access” to the system, both claims were instantly revealed to be untrue… by Community Notes itself.

“Elon Musk has touted Community Notes as a way to fight false and misleading information on X,” NBC News tweeted.

The outlet then declared”@NBCNews gained access to the system, and found that on posts containing known misinformation, few posts were ever corrected. Many fact-checks were delayed.”

The claims were quickly revealed to be complete BS, hilariously by Community Notes.

One note reads, “NBC did not ‘gain access’ to any special Twitter system they merely had one of the many thousands of community notes contributors show them that some misleading posts had yet to have any notes added.”

It adds that “Any 6 month old account with a verified phone number can join the program.”

Another points out that it is completely erroneous to suggest some back room employee is approving notes, as implied by NBC.

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BBC’s disinformation correspondent and chief fact-checker Marianna Spring is accused of lying on her CV by falsely claiming to have worked with a Beeb journalist when applying for a job in Moscow

The BBC‘s disinformation correspondent is facing claims that she lied about her experience on her CV.

Marianna Spring, 27, shot to prominence with her reporting on the way social media has been used to peddle false information.

But she is now facing the embarrassing allegation that she gave misleading information herself –  one claim of working with a respected BBC correspondent – to try to secure work.

According to a report, about five years ago Ms Spring was trying to get work as a freelancer in Moscow for US-based news site Coda Story.

An article in The New European said when she applied to the website’s editor-in-chief Natalia Antelava in 2018, she said she had worked alongside BBC correspondent Sarah Rainsford on covering the ‘perception of Russia’ during the 2018 football World Cup.

Her CV reportedly bragged: ‘June 2018: Reported on International News during the World Cup, specifically the perception of Russia, with BBC correspondent Sarah Rainsford.’

According to The New European, Ms Antelava, a former BBC journalist herself, is said to have rebuked Ms Spring after checking out the claim.

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Google Likes To Say Fact-Checkers It Uses Are “Independent.” But It Also Funds Them.

In a world where censorship dons the cloak of fact-checking, the recent allocation of grants by the Global Fact Check Fund raises brows. The fund, which is a joint effort of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) housed at the Poynter Institute and the technology behemoth Google, along with its subsidiary YouTube, has been touted as a guardian of truth. With $875,000 in grants divided among 35 organizations across 45 countries, it aims to arm them with modern websites, manpower, and training to identify misinformation. However, the initiative comes with its own set of problematic undertones.

The broad strokes painted by the fund’s mission statement include terms such as “increasing quality, volume, frequency, scale, and impact of fact-checking abilities” – a seemingly lofty aim. The IFCN’s director, Angie Drobnic Holan, frames it as a crusade against misinformation, stating, “Misinformation is on the march in many parts of the world. This important funding will enable fact-checking organizations to become better at their work, stronger in their capabilities and wider in their reach.”

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Snopes Self-Immolates Taking A Shot At Musk

The folks at Snopes, whose whore mongering (and allegedly rapey) co-founder was fired for mass plagiarism, have once again illustrated why the world of ‘fact checkers’ are nothing more than otherwise-unemployable partisan hacks.

On Tuesday, Snopes took a shot at Elon Musk in a hit-piece titled “Was the Missing Titanic Submersible Using Satellites from Elon Musk’s Company?“

The article is of course meant to imply that the OceanGate Titanic exploration submersible, which lost contact with its surface support vessel on Sunday, went missing due to a Starlink failure.

After Snopes’ account tweeted the article, a scorching Twitter community note tore the article to shreds – noting that while OceanGate has used StarLink services, they’re used for their surface vessels, not their submersibles. Idiots. The note also clarifies that radio frequencies such as StarLink’s do not work underwater.

“Starlink operates in the 10.7 to 12.7 GHz band. [radionavlab.ae.utexas.edu/wp-content/upl…] Penetration depth of 2.45GHz in water is <8cm and falls off with increasing frequency. [cober.com/wp-content/upl…] Therefore, Starlink cannot be used to communicate with an underwater submarine,” the note states.

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THE UN’S NEW FACT-CHECKING SYSTEM CALLED “IVERIFY” WILL BE USED TO CRACK DOWN ON “MISINFORMATION” ALL OVER THE WORLD

Our world is becoming a creepier place with each passing day.  Most of us just want to live our lives in peace without excessive governmental interference, but unfortunately the control freaks that are running things just can’t help themselves.  Ultimately, they aren’t going to be happy until they are able to watch, track, monitor and control virtually everything that we write, say and do.  This is one of the big reasons why they are gearing up to introduce “central bank digital currencies” all over the western world.  Such digital currencies will make it much easier for them to control us financially.  And a new tool that was just introduced by the UN will make it much easier for them to control what we write on the Internet…

The iVerify System Is Here

The UN’s new fact-checking system is going to be a game changer, but so far the mainstream media is being really quiet about it.

Perhaps that is because they don’t want millions of us to object to this sort of tyranny.

The UN developed iVerify in conjunction with big tech companies and Soros-funded organizations, and it will be used to crack down on “disinformation” and “hate speech” all over the globe…

The United Nations has unveiled an “automated” fact-checking service to counter so-called disinformation and hate speech on the internet in a project partnered with Big-Tech and Soros-funded organisations.

In response to what they brand as “online information pollution”, which they claim is a “global challenge”, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has launched its iVerify platform to counter alleged disinformation and hate speech online.

The global body’s “automated fact-checking tool”, was developed in partnership with the United Nations International Computing Centre (UNICC), Facebook and Google-funded fact checker Meedan, the Meta-owned CrowdTangle, and the Soros-funded International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN).

Needless to say, this tool will not be used to crack down on points of view that Big Tech and George Soros agree with.

Instead, it will be used to crack down on those that choose to be independent thinkers, and that should greatly alarm all of us.

Of course iVerify is not the only very strange development that has been in the news in recent days…

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Fact Check: Nearly 100 Percent of Political Contributions From Fact Checkers Go to Democrats

It all started during the 2016 Presidential Election in the United States, when the political and mainstream media establishments began seeding the narrative that Donald Trump was always lying, and Hillary Clinton was telling the truth, and therefore a new tier of information and speech policing was now needed to save society from itself. Enter the fact checkers.

Since then, political “fact-checkers” have enjoyed a type of privileged status alongside the corporate MSM, and they now wield great power as the arbiters of truth. Along with the MSM, Big Tech firms and partisan foundations have also ploughed hundreds of millions of dollars into building this new arm of the censorship industrial complex.

However, critics have rightly pointed out how political “fact-checking” is in fact a fraudulent enterprise. Far from being objective, the evidence show that this new industry is non-transparent, totally unaccountable, as well as being politically and ideologically weaponised. Rather than elevate debate and discourse, it serves as a blunt tool of mass-censorship by the Establishment who use their army of paid fact-checkers to suppress and marginalise any unfavored viewpoints and opinions, as well as suppressing any inconvenient information which could threaten the established order, or undermine government policy.

The “Fact checkers” constantly represent themselves as being unbiased, authoritative arbiters of “The Science”, election integrity, overseas wars, and the overall public discourse.

By now, the whole ‘fact checker’ industry has been thoroughly exposed as a fraud, and now we have the receipts that the entire operation is completely partisan…

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